Introducing Scroller - Virtual Scrolling for DataTables

Introducing Scroller - Virtual Scrolling for DataTables

As part of the DataTables 1.8 package I introduced a new "extra" called Scroller. This plug-in gives DataTables virtual scrolling capabilities, which basically means a scrolling table can be used to show very large datasets with great performance.

Great to hear it works well with Ignited Datatables :-). I've just added a small fix for the iDisplayStart issue you were seeing - you can get this from the downloads page ( http://datatables.net/download ) as the 'dev' version of Scroller. Basically the calculation that was being done could result in a negative number as you were seeing - I've added a check and correction for this now.

I saw in the Scroller documentation that the row height calculation is slightly off if it isn't the same for all rows. This is exactly what happened in my case and it's not a possibility for me to add the suggested css th, td { white-space: nowrap; }. Do you plan to fix it in further release?

And by the way I think there's some words missing in your blog post about the Virtual Scroller right after: "to your CSS, or wrapping the content of the cells in a"

I'm afraid not - no. The fact that all rows must be the same height is engrained deeply into Scroller. For example, if you have 2 million rows, and want to jump to row 1.5 million - you'd need to know the height of 1.5 million rows, which would kill any CPU! This is why Scroller has to make this assumption.

DataTables can do what you want - just disabled Scroller, keep y-scrolling enabled and disable pagination - however, it means you can't take advantage of the speed optimisations of Scroller.